Since the mid-1800's, injectors have exploited the ability of steam to combine with water into which the steam condenses, transferring its momentum energy, for outputting liquid at a pressure higher than the steam input pressure. My hydrokinetic amplifier also transfers vapor energy to liquid to increase the output pressure, but it does this much more efficiently than an injector. With hindsight knowledge of how my hydrokinetic amplifier works, it is clear that steam injectors suffered large friction losses in accelerating water while the water engaged in internal wall. My hydrokinetic amplifier accelerates liquid in a free jet surrounded by vapor and avoids the large friction losses from accelerating water along a wall.
Some prior art jet pumps, such as fluid heaters, have also used a liquid jet spaced from a wall and surrounded by vapor, but these have failed to achieve a substantial pressure gain. Hindsight now suggests that they could have been designed to increase pressure, but actual practice shows that they were designed merely to heat the liquid. They failed to accelerate the vapor to a high velocity, they lacked a sufficient distance for the vapor to condense in the liquid and transfer its kinetic energy before reaching a diffuser, and they lacked a small enough discharge opening to pass mostly liquid through a diffuser for efficiently converting kinetic energy to pressure.
My hydrokinetic amplifier suffers none of these shortcomings. It is structured to maximize the kinetic energy of the vapor, transfer as much of that kinetic energy as possible to a free liquid jet, keep friction losses to a minimum, and efficiently convert liquid velocity to liquid pressure at the output diffuser. Thus, by a combination of efficiency-improving strategies, my hydrokinetic amplifier produces a surprisingly large pressure amplification that can exceed the sum of the absolute liquid and vapor input pressures by a factor of four. This readily beats injectors, the best of which cannot double the absolute liquid and vapor input pressures.
The collapse of vapor condensing within my hydrokinetic amplifier produces a suction that can draw in operating vapor from a subatmospheric pressure source. This allows my hydrokinetic amplifier to produce a substantial pressure gain from a subatmospheric pressure vapor--a feat unachievable by injectors, which cannot function at all with subatmospheric pressure vapor, or by fluid heaters, which do not produce more than incidental pressure gain and require a pressurized source of liquid to entrain the subatmospheric vapor.
The suction can also draw in subatmospheric pressure liquid at the same time that subatmospheric pressure vapor is providing the motive power. So unlike prior art jet pump devices that require a pressurized fluid to entrain a subatmospheric pressure fluid, my hydrokinetic amplifier can operate on subatmospheric pressure vapor without any high pressure entrainment. This allows my hydrokinetic amplifier to vaporize and condense liquids at subatmospheric pressures without using vacuum pumps.
The superior capabilities of my hydrokinetic amplifier can be exploited in a variety of ways that include condensing, evaporating, cooling, pumping, forming jets, entraining fluids, transferring heat, liquifying gas, and producing warmed and pressurized liquid output.